WEBVTT 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:17.000 In today's digital landscape, corporate control, licensing deals, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:24.000 When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal, whether by design or by attack. 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:30.000 Our collective memory is compromised, and the public's ability to access its own history is at risk. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:41.000 Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Freeland. I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive. I want to welcome you to today's book talk, which is the last of our series for 2024. Can't believe we're here at the end. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:51.000 To better understand these problems around preserving our digital heritage, last month the Internet Archive released Vanishing Culture, a report on our fragile cultural record. 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:56.000 Our plan for today was to bring together the editors of the work. That's Luca Massara. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:06.000 Julia Zaskina and myself for a roundtable. But unfortunately, Julia wasn't able to attend. She has another commitment and sends her regrets. So today. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:15.000 You're going to hear from Luca, the main author of the work, Katie Livingston, one of the authors who contributed an essay on the importance of preservation 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:19.000 and me about the report and our work in preparing it. 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:29.000 As we start up here, I want to make sure that you have grabbed your copy of The Vanishing Culture Report. This is a PDF. It is freely available at the Internet Archive at archive.org. 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:49.000 It is published under CC by Creative Commons license, so you can remix it and share it with people, share it as widely as you possibly can. We want as many people to read about these issues of preservation as possible. So please read and share the Vanishing Culture report. And a big thank you to 00:01:49.000 --> 00:02:02.000 Duncan, who's working here behind the scenes, who shared the link out today and will share out other links across today's session. But before we dive in here, let's take care of some logistics. 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:10.000 Please say hi in the chat. Introduce yourself. Let us know who you are, where you're tuning in from today, what brings you to this topic. 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:24.000 Our chat is open for the discussion today. Please do keep it relevant and respectful and feel free to drop in questions for us, for the panelists, and then we'll work those into our conversation. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:48.000 A question that always comes up is, is this recession being recorded? Yes, it is. And you will get a copy of it, a link to it in an email that we'll send you tomorrow along with all the other resources that we're sharing here today. So you don't need to worry about furiously writing down every link that comes along. We're going to archive all of that. It'll be on archive.org and we'll share it out with you tomorrow. 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:59.000 So as we get started here today, I would like to welcome first Brewster Kale, the Internet Archives founder and digital librarian to the screen to give us a little background. How are you doing today, Brewster? 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:06.000 Oh, thank you for doing this, Chris. And Luca, just congratulations on a terrific book. It's never been easier 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:29.000 to preserve our culture, that we now have abilities to go and print, store, reproduce, make digital copies going and putting them in multiple places, putting them in different media, and yet our culture is vanishing. The library system is under attack. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:32.000 My biggest mission. 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:53.000 shaking part of these attacks is actually from the publishers with licensing problems. And we need our culture to be able to continue to have civil discourse that becomes informed and progressive. And so I think this is a key book and a key time. So thank you very much, Luca. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:57.000 And I'm looking forward to the rest of this session. Back to you, Chris. 00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:07.000 Thanks, Brewster. Up next, I'd like to welcome Dave Hansen to the screen. Dave is the Executive Director of Authors Alliance, who is the co-host for these book talks. 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:14.000 And Dave will help facilitate today's conversation. So over to you, Dave. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:25.000 Thanks, Chris, and welcome, everyone. So I'm super excited about today's talk. I'm like super excited about all of the talks that we do, but especially today. 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:30.000 Because I think that this report is one of the most important 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:39.000 talks that we are going to cover in this series and is one of the most important issues really of the current moment. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:48.000 as we think about the future of access to information. So thank you all for joining us. I'm really happy to see the good audience here today. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:05:00.000 So I guess I'll do a little introduction of myself and Authors Alliance if you haven't heard of us before. So I am the executive director and Authors Alliance is a nonprofit that 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:06.000 exists to advance the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly. 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:13.000 And I think from the perspective of our members, we have about 3000 members. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:19.000 And one of the major issues that I hear from authors every day is. 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:28.000 that they are worried about what their intellectual legacy is 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 years from now. 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:33.000 And I think if you talk with authors, leave aside 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:44.000 what you hear from publishers about authors interests and kind of turning the screws of copyright or generating royalties or those things. If you really sit down and talk with authors. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:49.000 The main thing that they really want to see is they want people to read their 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:55.000 And they want people to read their works, not just now, but out into the future. 00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:00.000 And the biggest threat that authors currently face is not 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:11.000 copyright infringement, not big technology companies coming in and usurping their work. The biggest threat that most authors face is obscurity. 00:06:11.000 --> 00:06:18.000 And the role of libraries and archives in preserving their works is so important. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:28.000 And yet, through this report, and we'll hear about this today, that role is really at risk because of some of the legal and policy 00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:35.000 decisions that have been made over the last several decades that 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:44.000 have made it very, very difficult for organizations like the Internet Archive, like many other libraries, to do what their job is. 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:57.000 So I'm just really excited that we're going to have this talk and I hope it will spur some of you to think a little bit more about like what you can do and what we can all do together to help address some of these issues. 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:07.000 Oh, and Duncan, thank you. I sometimes forget, but I'm glad Duncan put the link to join Authors Alliance. So if you're an author of any type. 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:16.000 and you care about these kinds of issues, you care about your work being read out into the future, I invite you to join us. Membership is free. 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:24.000 And one of the things that that does is it helps us better speak on your behalf in policy debates and legal settings. 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:30.000 In all sorts of settings to advocate for the interests of authors who want their works to be 00:07:30.000 --> 00:07:37.000 So that's Authors Alliance. Now I have the privilege of introducing 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:40.000 our panel today. So first. 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:48.000 I will be introducing Luca Massara, who is the Public Humanities Fellow at the Internet Archive 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:59.000 And an English PhD candidate at Stanford University specializing in contemporary American literature, the history of text technologies, and the digital humanities. 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:06.000 His dissertation explores how print on demand has revolutionized literary publishing and experimentation. 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:09.000 And I look forward to reading his dissertation Monday. 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:19.000 Second, I get to introduce Chris Freeland, a good friend. Chris Freeland is the director of library services at Internet Archive. 00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:23.000 Where he works in support of the organization's mission 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:25.000 to provide universal access to all knowledge. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:32.000 Before joining Internet Archive, Chris was an associate university librarian at Washington University in St. Louis. 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:37.000 Where he managed the library's digital initiatives and related services. 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:44.000 And then I'm also privileged to introduce Katie, who I really have not met before, but 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:48.000 have read her work, and I think she's going to talk a little bit about her 00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:57.000 her contribution to this report a little bit. So Katie Livingston is an English PhD candidate at Stanford. 00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:03.000 And she has a focus on American literature from 1840 to 1940. 00:09:03.000 --> 00:09:07.000 And Katie researches class mobility in the novel 00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:12.000 women's literature and local color regionalist fiction. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:14.000 So those are my introductions. 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:21.000 And we are now, I think, going to get everybody on the screen here. 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:25.000 Yes. 00:09:25.000 --> 00:09:33.000 Here we all are, and I am going to hand it over to Luca. 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:38.000 Yes, and I'm going to share screen now. Can everybody see this okay? 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:51.000 Excellent. Cool. So first off, thank you very much to the Internet Archive for bringing me on board for this project in the first place. It was an absolute joy to do this over the summer. Brewster, thank you for your kind words. And Dave, thank you for the introduction as well. 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:58.000 So I'm really eager to move into conversation. So I'm going to try to keep my remarks around eight or nine minutes and hopefully won't go longer than that. 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:09.000 And the report is composed of a bunch of essays alongside a part that I individually wrote, and the essays are all wonderful in and of themselves, and you all should definitely go and read each and every single one. 00:10:09.000 --> 00:10:13.000 But because I'm here, I'm going to talk specifically about the part that I wrote. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:18.000 Which is titled Media Preservation and the Production of Public Memory. 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:23.000 And I'd like to start with some qualifications about my professional training and the kind of work that I do. 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:32.000 Because it's my background that I think is what makes this report a little bit different than other popular and excellent readings that already exist on the subject of vanishing culture. 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:35.000 So I'm not a professional archivist. 00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:38.000 But I do dabble in archival theory and I have little archives of my own. 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:45.000 And I'm not a lawyer at all, but I do think a lot about copyright and its broad intersections of literary studies. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:55.000 what I am and what I'm trained in is to be a humanities scholar. And so what I wrote is a humanity style approach to the problem of vanishing culture. 00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:06.000 Now, the humanities has a really powerful but extremely dense intellectual tradition of theorizing the role that archives play in constructing and controlling human relations. 00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:11.000 some of the most well-known names in this tradition are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Sadia Hartman. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:17.000 and Ashilan Bembe, all of whom were tremendous and excellent writers, but extremely difficult to parse. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:23.000 And so one of the major goals of my piece was to translate this kind of rich intellectual tradition 00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:32.000 into an accessible critique of our contemporary media environment, which over the last decade, as we've talked about now, has grown to be reliant on licensing and streaming. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:34.000 because of my humanities background. 00:11:34.000 --> 00:11:39.000 The central concern on this piece is the rapidly diminishing ability for members of the public 00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:46.000 and public serving institutions to save and make accessible the cultural expressions that matter to them. 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:56.000 More so in an age that's saturated with misinformation and cultural erasures, the piece raises an alarm about the control that media conglomerates can impose through copyright and limited access. 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:00.000 upon what culture and information is available to the public. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:03.000 who in the world gets to view it and for how long. 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:10.000 And so attending, not yet, attending these concerns, my part of the report is split into three different sections. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:19.000 Section 1, which is titled The Digital Memory Hole, explains how licensing and streaming specifically is detrimental to long-term accessibility and preservation efforts. 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:34.000 And here, the main point that I try to make is that ownership is essential for libraries and individuals. I'm going to take the liberty to quote myself here. I promise this is going to be the only long quote that I'm reading, but I also want you all to get a taste for the sort of sound and feeling of the report. 00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:43.000 So I write that VHS and DVD distributions historically allowed cult followings to emerge around unorthodox films. 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:46.000 like Dazed and Confused, Donnie Darko, and Fight Club. 00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:53.000 causing these films to be critically re-evaluated as culturally significant long after they originally flocked at the box office. 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:59.000 that same process of an independent and passionate public keeping subcultural expression alive 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:02.000 cannot happen of media that the public cannot own. 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:11.000 Without physical distribution or digital ownership for individuals and libraries, digital content such as ebooks and audiobooks, streaming-only music. 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:15.000 film, television shows, online news, licensed software. 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:19.000 and more can completely disappear when licenses expire. 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:24.000 And when publishers decide that it is no longer profitable, be it economically or ideologically. 00:13:24.000 --> 00:13:27.000 to keep that content online. 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:39.000 Section 2, titled Recent Digital Vanishing and Preservation Efforts, subsequently details these instances of loss, and particularly in the realms of digital culture, television, and video games. 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:44.000 These losses are then juxtaposed with new data about the Internet Archive's digital holdings. 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:51.000 showing how non-commercial archives and libraries are really instrumental for ensuring that culture does not prematurely vanish. 00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:56.000 And of particular note in this section is data by Mark Graham. And so alum of the Internet Archive 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:03.000 who conducted research on the Wayback Machines archived links in response to a 2024 PO report on link rot. 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:15.000 And what they discovered is that around 62% of the URLs that Pew's report had classified as basically being dead are actually preserved in the Wayback Machine at least once. And that's an amazing number and it's great. 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:21.000 But it's also a number that tells us that there's still more work to do in the world of web preservation. 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:26.000 The last section of the report is titled Historical Losses in the Future of Cultural Preservation. 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:41.000 And what I do there is I link quantitative studies of long historical losses in the film and music industry to our contemporary preservation dilemmas. My suggestion in this section is that the large scale historical losses in these industries throughout the 20th century 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:47.000 which were caused by things like medial obsolescence, corporate profit motivation, and copyright restrictions. 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:54.000 But these losses offer a chilling glimpse at what the remnants of our digital cultural record 00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:56.000 might look like in the decades to come. 00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:03.000 I conclude the report by discussing the need to culturally, legally, and financially empower nonprofit public-facing preservation 00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:10.000 And lending activities so that our record is built by everyday people and not just the interest of powerful elites. 00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:20.000 So in presenting any work on vanishing culture, it would probably be a tragic and ironic misstep to not at least acknowledge just a few of the really exceptional writings that came before me. 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:32.000 who are instrumental models when I was drafting this report and who I really see myself in dialogue with. So first and foremost is my brilliant co-editor, Julia Zaskina, and her writing partner, Kyle Courtney. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:36.000 They have a wonderful work of legal history titled The Publisher Playbook. 00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:40.000 which insightfully shows how publishers have attempted to obstruct the library mission 00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:45.000 through lawsuits throughout the entirety of the 20th century. 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:48.000 And so I see the work that I've done in the report as a sort of similar historical project. 00:15:48.000 --> 00:15:56.000 Or what I'm doing is I'm sketching out a longer story of publishers and rights holders, historical inability to operate as good preservationists. 00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:04.000 The other two projects that I must acknowledge are Glenn Moody's World Culture and Aaron Persinowski and Jason Schultz's The End of Ownership. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:17.000 both tremendous books in their own right. And really what was important to me wasn't just their ability to offer these succinct criticisms of the harms that copyright and licensing and conglomeration poses to consumers and creators. 00:16:17.000 --> 00:16:24.000 But it was their ability to translate the sort of densities of the law and economics into an argument that the average reader could understand. 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:30.000 that I really took away from their work. It's very public facing. It's very accessible. And I learned a lot about tone. 00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:33.000 through study in their works. 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:42.000 I just want to end now by briefly discussing what I nearly titled this piece, and that is media preservation and the Erosion of Public Memory. 00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:53.000 So on the surface, that's probably a clearer title than production. But I had this realization while I was kind of aimlessly wandering around a DSW the evening before the final title was due. 00:16:53.000 --> 00:17:00.000 that erosion really misses this kind of nuanced but incredible point that I hope people walk away with after reading the report. 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:07.000 the erosion of public memory to me suggests that public memory is a sort of singular and objective thing. 00:17:07.000 --> 00:17:15.000 I and many contributors to the report try to move against that narrative by emphasizing the value of little archival acts. 00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:18.000 whether that be court film fans keeping their favorite movies alive. 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:25.000 or families scanning their grandmother's cookbooks, as Katie describes really wonderfully in her moving essay on preserving cookbooks. 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:33.000 What I advocate for in the report and in sort of my humanities scholarship is public memories rather than public memory, the plural. 00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:45.000 And it's the plural that I think is at risk of disappearing when licensing and streaming places preservation and access solely in the hands of giant media corporations as opposed to nonprofit initiatives. 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:47.000 or individuals. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:52.000 And so the title that I settled on, Media Preservation and the production of public memory. 00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:57.000 suggests that public memory is a construction that is produced out of our surrounding media. 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:02.000 It's produced by Rideians, sound recordings, films, websites, photographs, you name it. 00:18:02.000 --> 00:18:14.000 And of course, the availability of those things in the first place is structured by the corporate and legal infrastructures that control our access to and our preservation of these things. 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:17.000 In describing public memory as a production. 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:19.000 And then linking that production of media preservation. 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:28.000 My goal was to remind readers that what they personally choose to preserve and share and who they choose to empower with the capacity to preserve and share materials. 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:33.000 will collaboratively work to constitute that thing that we call public memory. 00:18:33.000 --> 00:18:40.000 And so if we want our cultural record and factual information to be produced by the interests of massive media companies, then we do nothing. 00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:46.000 But if we want a record that is built by diverse human interests, then we need to begin strongly advocating for media ownership. 00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:54.000 copyright reform, and protections for digital archiving and lending so that anybody who cares has the ability to shape what gets preserved. 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:58.000 what gets remembered and what gets lost to time. 00:18:58.000 --> 00:19:00.000 Thank you very much. 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:03.000 I'm going to stop my share. 00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:05.000 That's so good, Luca. 00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:08.000 Thank you. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:19.000 Let's see, and I think we're going to have Katie and Dave join here now for the remainder of the conversation. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:22.000 Thank you, Luca. And Chris, if I have my notes right, I get to start off. 00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:23.000 You do. Yep. Kick us off. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:29.000 So I probably have the most interesting but also the easiest question to ask. 00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:35.000 Which is, I'd like to get you talking about how this report came about. So Chris, could you 00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:36.000 Take that. 00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:43.000 I'll start. Yeah. And then would love to bring Luca into the conversation quickly and Katie as well. 00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:54.000 So in addition to hosting these book talks and being a librarian at the Internet Archive, I also have somehow found myself to be quite involved in our social media. 00:19:54.000 --> 00:19:58.000 don't ask me. It works, whatever. But what we noticed 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:02.000 online starting in about 2021. 00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:22.000 that when the Internet Archive, through our social media accounts, when we were talking about issues related to preservation and when we were talking about issues related to like vanishing culture, like I think there was an AFI American Film Institute post that said that the vast majority of silent films are lost. 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:38.000 We retweeted that. It had nothing to do with the Internet Archive. We just retweeted this and it went like monster huge. And so what we started to understand was that when the Internet Archive started talking about preservation issues, people listened and it made sense because one of the first things you think about 00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:42.000 When you think of the Internet Archive, you think of the Wayback Machine, you think of web 00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:46.000 archiving and preservation. So we just started 00:20:46.000 --> 00:20:48.000 Finding these examples of finding these examples 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:56.000 this idea of streaming was limiting what we could buy, what would be on our shelves, what would stay on our shelves, our virtual shelves. 00:20:56.000 --> 00:21:13.000 And so it just started working and people started responding to it. And there was a point where we kept saying, those of us who were talking internally, we kept pointing over to the wall and say, we wish we had that report, you know, that vanishing culture report that we could point to 00:21:13.000 --> 00:21:21.000 And let people like understand really what we're trying to say here. Because we were sort of waving our hands and describing this problem 00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:32.000 in a round, cloudy kind of way, but without any specificity. And so it wasn't until this year, actually, earlier this year, that we got serious about writing the report. 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:48.000 And that's how then we came to meet Luca. So Luca, I'd love to hand it off to you about, so then how did you come to this work? 00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:50.000 Yes. Yep. 00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:51.000 Michael Minna. 00:21:51.000 --> 00:22:00.000 Yeah, so I'm very good friends with a formal, what was he, a legal policy fellow, Michael? I'm very good friends and colleagues of Michael Mena, who was a legal policy fellow with the Internet Archive. He did a report with Leela Bailey on library perspectives on the problem of licensing. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:13.000 an ebook availability. And so Michael and I would hang out all the time. We would watch the X-Files. We would have conversations about archives and things like that because the X-Files is actually this wonderful commentary on archives. I don't know if you guys know that. 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:19.000 And we would have these conversations about vanishing culture. And one day he comes to me and he says, hey. 00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:29.000 The Internet Archive has this ambitious project where they want to start thinking about everything that has ever disappeared. And I was like, that sounds like a crazy project. And I would love to be involved with that. 00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:37.000 And Michael was great, but he recognizes that his work is more in law and policy than it is in sort of the digital humanities. 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:44.000 And so he's like, I'm going to introduce you to the Internet Archive and see if you'd be interested in having this conversation and doing this work with them. 00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:53.000 That's really how it came about. And then from there, I went into researching as many instances of vanishing culture as I could, which was 00:22:53.000 --> 00:22:59.000 very exhausting and sad work, I would say, but also very rewarding at the same time. 00:22:59.000 --> 00:23:15.000 I think we're going to do a deep dive on that exhausting and sad part, but also the happier side as well. And I think that actually one of those ways is through the stories, the essays that we have. And so for viewers here. 00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:26.000 The report is broken into two main sections. So there's part one, which Luca wrote, which is the humanist perspective on vanishing culture. And then our second part of the report 00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:34.000 Our more than 20 essays written by scholars, enthusiasts, individuals who are passionate about a particular topic, answering the prompt 00:23:34.000 --> 00:23:41.000 Why is it important to preserve blank? That's what we asked them to write an essay on. Tell us what you think is important and why. 00:23:41.000 --> 00:23:55.000 And so one of those essays came to us from Katie Livingston. And I would love, Katie, for everyone to know, this is the second time that Katie and I have had a chance to talk synchronously. Yesterday was the first time 00:23:55.000 --> 00:24:08.000 So much of our work has been asynchronous and done over email. So it's great to get to have a chance to sit here and talk with you in person. But I would love to know, Katie, how you came into the fold. 00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:11.000 into this report. 00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:25.000 Yeah, thank you. So similarly, I feel like there's like been a little telephone game of so-and-so passes it along to so-and-so. And so Luca knows that I kind of have a little bit of a side interest in 00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:32.000 domestic culture, and then also domestic objects, domestic ephemera, cookbooks would be among those. 00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:34.000 As well as 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:41.000 Things like handicraft that are usually associated with women in domestic tasks. So things like quilting. 00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:56.000 And these are tangentially related to the work that I do. So you wouldn't necessarily know that I have an interest in these things unless you know me personally as Luca did. And so I think there was somebody else who was on this topic at first. 00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:05.000 And they ended up dropping. And Luca was like, hey, I know that you have interest and knowledge in this subject and would you like to take it up? And I was like. 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:11.000 Of course. And it just so happened that I also had personal connections 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:14.000 through my grandmother. 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:18.000 with cookbooks that were like 00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:26.000 produced and sold and circulated within small communities. So kind of like supporting this idea that Luca was talking about where these 00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:37.000 communities are, it's not necessarily like one huge public memory, but smaller, more niche groups or communities that are producing their own memory 00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:40.000 objects and identities. 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:58.000 I come from a small rural community and grew up in the church. So we had lots of those, you know, First United Methodist cookbooks hanging around our house. So those, as well as my grandmother's recipe box. So when I, Katie, when I read your 00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:05.000 When I read your essay, the first draft of your essay, I was like, she got it. That's exactly right. These aren't just… 00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:16.000 These aren't just instructions on how to make a recipe. These are like family histories and there's so much that's wrapped up in our, not only the 00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:33.000 the page itself, the marginalia, the food scraps that are crusted on the page, like that's so much a part of this material culture of the cookbook. And I think you just really nailed it in your essay. 00:26:33.000 --> 00:26:39.000 Yeah, and I love that you bring up, I actually grew up in the Methodist church as well. So I feel like that's an interesting 00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:40.000 There we go. 00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:50.000 I didn't know about. But yeah, the cookbook I have is from the county. But I think like bringing up something like churches is really important, right? Because then you have even more like 00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:57.000 sub communities of sub-communities and these recipes kind of get circulated not only through the textual object, but also through like 00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:03.000 word of mouth and then coming together and having the classic church potluck, you know. 00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:04.000 Yeah, that's great. 00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:05.000 Yeah. 00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.000 What I really love about this sort of regional smaller cookbooks is often you have the names of the of the 00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:14.000 designer the recipe like that's printed alongside of it, which is just absolutely beautiful. 00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:21.000 The Internet Archive has a lot of those where you read through and it says, oh, so-and-so wrote this, so-and-so wrote this. And you really get a flavor for who that person was. 00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:26.000 Both through like the food itself, but also in the way in which they write their recipes. 00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:36.000 Yeah, genealogists love cookbooks and family Bibles you know that there's a lot of family heritage, family histories that are committed to Bibles and cookbooks. 00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:50.000 Luca, so I hope that the audience has come to sort of get a bit of your voice from the presentation that you gave. And I want to say that when I when I 00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:59.000 read your first draft, right? So the way that this all came about was that there was a group of us, Luca, Julia, myself. 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:10.000 And Leela Bailey, who sort of sat down in, I think it was June of this year, was one of our first meetings and said, okay, we really want to write this. And we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. 00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:17.000 But here's kind of what we're hoping to accomplish with the report. And I think through a whole bunch of information Luca's way. 00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:21.000 And then Luca, you went off and started writing. 00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:35.000 And I got the email that said, here's my first draft. And I'll be honest, I was like, okay, I don't know how this is going to go. I had read samples of your writing before, so I knew you were a really, really good writer, but I wasn't sure what your take on this was going to be. 00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:48.000 And I was bowled over. Honestly, when I read it, I was like, this is so good. This is a humanist perspective on this problem. Like I'm a librarian and a recovering biologist and dabbled in technology. And so 00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:59.000 So many times when we read these kinds of issues about like what's happening with preservation, they're written through those lenses, right, of library preservation. And boy, I've read all of those reports. 00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:06.000 They're all interesting, but you gave something that was really different. And I would love to 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:18.000 For you to talk a little bit about what was it from a humanities scholar perspective that got you interested in this? And how did you apply that into the first draft and subsequent drafts? 00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:32.000 I think it'd be good to start by qualifying what that first draft exactly was. So I sent Chris basically like these aphorisms that was in very manifesto form. And in hindsight, I probably would have been shocked if I was Chris. I would have been like, oh man. 00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:50.000 I don't know how this is going to turn out. He sent me like this bullet point manifestos with like this weird Raiders of the Lost Art quote at the beginning. And it was just kind of confused, right? 00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:51.000 Yes. 00:29:51.000 --> 00:29:52.000 But aphorisms actually are like really, really great. I see Laura has commented on aphorisms. Laura also has a great essay in the report, as you all read on African folktales. 00:29:52.000 --> 00:30:04.000 Aphorisms are super great. They're very common in sort of philosophy and in the humanities sometimes because they allow you to get at sort of like the root of an issue in a super bombastic and explosive way. 00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:10.000 And then you move from that sort of bombasticisms as the humanities tends to be. 00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:16.000 into something that's a little bit more nuanced and focused. And so that's kind of like how I approached writing the report was like, okay. 00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:23.000 what is like the boldest and most extreme thing that I could say about vanishing culture? And I collected those things. 00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:29.000 And then from there, I began to chisel it down and it became something that's a lot more legible and something that is the finalized report. 00:30:29.000 --> 00:30:37.000 Which is a lot less frightening than the aphorisms and manifesto. And I had written in the first place. Not for any intone or anything like that, but it was… 00:30:37.000 --> 00:30:45.000 just very grandiose. But the humanities approach for me really is, it stems out of a concern for human beings. 00:30:45.000 --> 00:31:03.000 at its core for remembering and preserving the humans that came before us and for acknowledging the humans that came before us and to treat objects as things that are created by people. And I think Katie does that really well with like the cookbooks thing, for example, where it's like, okay. 00:31:03.000 --> 00:31:05.000 Here's a cookbook. 00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:09.000 And it has all these annotations, all this family history to it. 00:31:09.000 --> 00:31:17.000 And that's something that's really missing in something like an ebook where you don't get the sort of legacy of like a family that's presented in an ebook. 00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:33.000 But it's something you get with a scan, which I think is really, really powerful. And it's something that I love about the Internet Archive in particular is that they have these scans of books, which are substantially different than ebooks, even though some publishers might disagree. 00:31:33.000 --> 00:31:39.000 Yeah, you had me from the Raiders of the Lost Ark aperism at the start. I was like, okay, this is… 00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:43.000 we're in for a ride. This is going to be a fun journey. 00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:49.000 Yeah. And it's meant to be a sort of ironic aphorism, right? You have like this model of the way in which like 00:31:49.000 --> 00:31:54.000 I think it came in 1977 or something like that. I could be missing on my date on Raiders. 00:31:54.000 --> 00:31:55.000 1982, I think. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:01.000 That's what it was, 1982. I had accidentally ridden 77 when I first did it but um 00:32:01.000 --> 00:32:09.000 Yeah, really that quote is actually an interesting time capsule, the way in which I think people used to approach archiving and preservation. 00:32:09.000 --> 00:32:16.000 And I wanted it to be this sort of ironic twist where like, that's not how we do preservation today and that's not how we should think about preservation. 00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:18.000 We should think about it in terms of like 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:25.000 being able to actually use these things, being able to use a Commodore 64 and to access the stuff that was on a Commodore 64 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:30.000 As opposed to just kind of looking at it and having fun with it. 00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:39.000 I've got a question for you. And I know that Katie and Luca, you have questions as well. I'll stop hugging the mic, but I do want to throw this one other question your way, Luca, which was. 00:32:39.000 --> 00:32:41.000 In compiling the report. 00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:49.000 I know that there was a lot that you want, a lot of ground that you wanted to cover and we had a short limited amount of time. I think actually it was 00:32:49.000 --> 00:32:58.000 more time bounded than anything because you have another job. You're a PhD student. You took a break from your dissertation to write 00:32:58.000 --> 00:33:10.000 To write a 40-page report, which I just think is amazing and crazy. I couldn't do it. I struggle with either one of those things, not both at the same time. What I'd love to know is. 00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:21.000 What surprises did you encounter as you were pulling the report together? And were there things that you had to like drop? 00:33:21.000 --> 00:33:30.000 Yeah, I think the number one surprise to me was the amount of like individual small communities that exist out there that are preserving things. So like we have the Internet Archive, for example. 00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:50.000 But I kept encountering these small little niche communities of people who care really specifically about little tiny objects and things. And that's not just in the digital space. So I had this. I really wanted to include this book, this zine called LA Rewind Video Store Archives of Los Angeles. And it's this beautiful zine 00:33:50.000 --> 00:34:03.000 that documents all the video stores that used to exist in LA. And these video stores don't have any record of existing often because like they closed before the internet was a thing. 00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:10.000 Before Google Maps was a thing. But they're remembered and they exist because some person sat down and decided to type out 00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.000 every single video store that existed in Los Angeles at the time. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:22.000 So one thing that I wanted to include was like this long commentary on like the zine and this sort of history of like small 00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:30.000 individuals who would go and they'd publish like these records of things and places and stuff that had happened. 00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:46.000 But that didn't exactly fit because it was a really tight report, right? The other thing I really wanted to include was this, Chris, you remember this. I had this really long paragraph about this William Faulkner quote that reads, the past is never, it's like the past is never dead. It's not even past. 00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:48.000 And I have like this long 00:34:48.000 --> 00:34:59.000 close reading of that quote. And I talked about how the important thing for us to do as human beings is to become conscious of the history around us and we can only become conscious of history 00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:10.000 If it's actually present in some sort of readable and accessible media form. The tone of that didn't exactly end up working for the final report in and of itself, but that's sort of like a 00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:21.000 It's a theme of the report that the past isn't dead. It's not even past and that our goal is to just try to remember the past through studying other media. 00:35:21.000 --> 00:35:26.000 As our musician in October said, in the lines he wrote for the song. 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:29.000 that he performed. The past isn't dead till it can't be read. 00:35:29.000 --> 00:35:33.000 Yes, it's a great song. 00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:35.000 Luca, do you have some questions? 00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:45.000 Yeah, I mean, Chris, I'm interested in your sort of personal feelings for getting involved in vanishing culture. Obviously, this is your job and this is the thing that you're concerned about. 00:35:45.000 --> 00:35:54.000 But what's the personal angle of this for you? What are the sort of stories and things that really matter to you intimately as a living, breathing human being? 00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:08.000 Yeah. This is my day job. And so I feel like I'm in the lucky and privileged position where I get to think about these issues and deal with these issues on a daily basis all through my workday and I'm not… 00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:26.000 It can be daunting and you can sort of be beaten down by some of the pressures. But ultimately, I find that what libraries and archives are doing is preserving information, holding onto it over time and providing it to people who need access to it. And so if you can see on the book truck behind me. 00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:28.000 I love books. And I'm a 00:36:28.000 --> 00:36:42.000 I like physical books. I like to hold the book. And I have a Kindle and I read eBooks and PDFs as well. But if I want to sit down and really enjoy a book, I'm going to try to do that in a paper form. And one of the reasons 00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:48.000 for that is because if I own that book, then I can hand it to someone who I want to read that book. 00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:54.000 And so those books are, there's a collection of those that are staying on my shelf. 00:36:54.000 --> 00:37:04.000 And then this is also a stopping point for the Little Free Library that's at the corner of my block where I am loading in books that I find important 00:37:04.000 --> 00:37:18.000 I've bought multiple copies of The End of Ownership from Persinowski, and I've put that into my little free library. I want my neighbors to read about the end of ownership and digital ownership. 00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:20.000 I'm just very passionate. 00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:37.000 about preservation and my work in libraries and around libraries has been on how do we digitize materials that are often kept away from the public, like rare books, you know, like behind lock and key where the average Joe or Jane just couldn't see those books. 00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:48.000 But boy, they're in the public domain. You can digitize them. There's no restrictions for why you should put them online. Do that. And that's what I've been doing for the past 25 years is scanning materials. I started working 00:37:48.000 --> 00:38:02.000 with the biodiversity Heritage Library, where we were scanning public domain scientific literature that needed to be out as widely available as possible. And the only thing that was standing in our way was some technology and some server space. 00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:08.000 And that's when I got connected actually to the Internet Archive. So it all kind of comes around for me. 00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:14.000 It's about preservation. And then like my personal story is that I grew up in and around libraries. My parents were public school teachers. 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:22.000 I grew up in a time and a place where we didn't have air conditioning in my house. And because my parents were public school teachers. 00:38:22.000 --> 00:38:24.000 Summers were hot. 00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:41.000 And we were all at home. And so we would load up in the car and drive to the public library, literally chill out at the public library, sitting in the air conditioning, reading books. And that just kicked off a lifelong love for me of books, of libraries, and of that 00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:50.000 the written word and how it can change people's lives. I mean, I read some of the most important books formative for me 00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:56.000 in that public library. And I hope that people still have that same experience. 00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:00.000 Today. 00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:02.000 Yeah, I think the um 00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:12.000 Unfortunately, I feel like the public library as a space is continuously dwindling, like its importance as a space is continuously dwindling. And I always have to remind my students in particular. 00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:15.000 Hey, there are libraries out there that you can use a 3D printer at. 00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:24.000 And like that you can check out DVDs from. And I just think there should be a better awareness of the value that they bring to society. 00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:34.000 Katie, sort of like similarly, I was wondering like your kind of personal investment in all of this. I know I've read your cookbook essay i mean 00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:46.000 Chris has read it, Dave has read it, but maybe for people who haven't read it, what is your sort of personal investment in the kind of cookbook here and its sort of status as this kind of vanishing object? 00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:56.000 Yeah, I'd love to talk about my personal investment in the essay that I wrote, but I would also love to talk about my personal investment in the project as a whole, if that's okay. 00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:03.000 Yeah, so I'm somebody who, I mean, I know you, Luca, will relate to this grew up 00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:15.000 on the internet and maybe in that same way, Chris, that you felt like the library was kind of there as your space to like access information, spend time like kind of a respite maybe. 00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:21.000 That's how I felt about the internet. And so I grew up with all of these 00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:29.000 I mean, I'm also from a rural area, so there's not a lot in the way of going out and doing things a lot of times. So I spent a lot of time online. 00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:35.000 And there are all of these cultural kind of mythologies that you grow up with. 00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:46.000 when that's how you're spending most of your time. And one of the things that has been a huge cultural mythology for me growing up has been the way back machine and this idea that like. 00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:56.000 the internet is forever. And the way that you will like access things that have been lost is through the way back machine so just knowing that like just that 00:40:56.000 --> 00:40:59.000 connection to the Internet Archive made me really excited to contribute. 00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:06.000 Of course, the thing that I'm contributing isn't about digital objects, it's about digitizing something physical. 00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:11.000 So yeah, my personal investment in the cookbook um 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:24.000 Dave mentioned a little bit in my bio, I study local color fiction. It may not be like a phrase that's familiar to a lot of people, but it's basically fiction that emerges from specific regions. 00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:34.000 in the United States. And a lot of these fictions have to do specifically with women, their domestic tasks, and then their communities. And you see like through reading these 00:41:34.000 --> 00:41:36.000 usually short stories. 00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:44.000 how community is built amongst women. And a lot of it is through things like recipe sharing. 00:41:44.000 --> 00:41:52.000 or even like medicinal recipes and then kind of like collecting and archiving that within the domestic space. 00:41:52.000 --> 00:41:56.000 So the way that I have access to that as somebody who lives in, you know. 00:41:56.000 --> 00:41:59.000 current year is through these 00:41:59.000 --> 00:42:06.000 routes like the church cookbook or the Grady County Homemakers Extension cookbook 00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:18.000 that I grew up with. So that was a really exciting way for me to both engage in something that I'm interested intellectually, but that's really personally very important to me as well. 00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:19.000 Yeah. 00:42:19.000 --> 00:42:31.000 Yeah. And, you know, something that I really liked about your piece isn't that you're just talking about the actual objects themselves, but you're talking about what's inside of the objects. Oftentimes they're like the conversation of like, well. 00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:38.000 what should be saved and what shouldn't be saved. And in my opinion, it's just like we should have the opportunity to be able to save anything that 00:42:38.000 --> 00:42:45.000 people want to save, right? But in particular, there was something in your essay that I wanted to ask you about. You talk about 00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:53.000 You talk about Vienna sausages rolled in barbecue sauce and crushed Fritos as like an example of like this kind of strange recipe. 00:42:53.000 --> 00:42:59.000 that you personally could be like, eh, I could do without that. It's kind of okay if it's not there. 00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:04.000 But I think you still think that there's kind of a value of preserving those recipes. 00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:13.000 For context as well, Katie also, I know I'm going to release this. Katie also has a very interesting intellectual interest in aspects, so little meat jellies. 00:43:13.000 --> 00:43:25.000 So I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about like, I don't know, what is the value of like these older recipes for you, whether it's like Vienna sausages and Fritos or aspics. Why is the recipe itself 00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:28.000 important. 00:43:28.000 --> 00:43:31.000 Yeah, I think that um like there's 00:43:31.000 --> 00:43:39.000 It's kind of the intellectual answer to this. And then there's the personal answer to this. So I'll start with the more intellectual one, which is that 00:43:39.000 --> 00:43:44.000 I think sometimes our strangest recipes are like strangest 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:53.000 cultural artifacts become the most representative maybe of a region. And I think once I moved out of Oklahoma, I kind of 00:43:53.000 --> 00:43:57.000 gained this awareness, right, that I could get this like 00:43:57.000 --> 00:44:05.000 shock value out of people by mentioning certain things that were maybe normal or normalized to me where I was growing up. 00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:12.000 And that were like, oh, like that's weird or that's strange or like that's backwards. And I kind of liked that 00:44:12.000 --> 00:44:22.000 I don't know, reaction that I would get from it because the thing that was the most standout or strange or weird then became like the most representative of 00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:30.000 my region or my culture that I came from, which would be something like, you know, ambrosia salad. 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:39.000 you know the kind of weird like oh processed food and we've turned it into this concoction and you might encounter it at a church potluck. 00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:53.000 So what is like weird or strange or outstanding to other people became very dear to me because it became representative, I guess, of like where I was from or my area or my culture or my background. 00:44:53.000 --> 00:45:00.000 Yes. And so I guess that falls in line with the more personal answer to this, which was 00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:07.000 Which is that like I grew up eating Vienna sausages you know and 00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:15.000 they're kind of weird, like gross little weenie things in brine. And now that I'm an adult, like I wouldn't eat them. 00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:20.000 I wouldn't eat that. I guess my tastes have changed over time, but there's something so 00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:25.000 endearing to me about like seeing this recipe that's just like 00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:29.000 strange, but also very, very close. 00:45:29.000 --> 00:45:32.000 to me like that specific ingredient of 00:45:32.000 --> 00:45:35.000 Vienna sausages 00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:39.000 Yeah. Oh, and wait, what was the part about the aspects that you asked? 00:45:39.000 --> 00:45:40.000 Can you say? 00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:44.000 Oh, I had said that you have a very specific intellectual interest and aspects 00:45:44.000 --> 00:45:48.000 and their role in American society. And I was wondering if you want to talk about that. 00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:54.000 Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. I think aspects are interesting, maybe in the same way as 00:45:54.000 --> 00:45:58.000 Vienna sausages and that they kind of started out as this 00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:12.000 high class food that was considered as like coming from France and like you wanted to get like the clear gelatin and make this big, you know, pastry chefs would make these big elaborate things. And over time, it became this thing of um 00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:16.000 associated with like mass produced food 00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:23.000 we look at the 50s and we see people putting like meats and gelatin and that's like not not according to art 00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:27.000 tastes these days. So I think that it's interesting to see like 00:46:27.000 --> 00:46:30.000 how something becoming 00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:32.000 processed mass marketed 00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:38.000 widely accessible and then domesticated 00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:40.000 kind of devalues it like as a cultural 00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:43.000 product and then product and then 00:46:43.000 --> 00:46:51.000 in line with kind of regionalism, you know, a lot of these areas where something like a county cookbook or a church cookbook would 00:46:51.000 --> 00:46:57.000 come out of, those are food deserts. So like if I can speak specifically about my 00:46:57.000 --> 00:47:03.000 one of my hometowns of Apache where I go stay there usually in the winters 00:47:03.000 --> 00:47:07.000 It's where my grandma has lived and I've 00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:13.000 partially grown up there, they have one little grocery store 00:47:13.000 --> 00:47:18.000 And then if you want to go like to the big grocery store, you have to drive like 30 minutes out say to like 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:21.000 Lawton or another town to go to the Walmart. 00:47:21.000 --> 00:47:23.000 And so 00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:33.000 these areas like there's there's a little bit of a lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables. And so things that are canned, processed. 00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:44.000 preserved that have shelf stability. Those become staples in the diet. So things like casseroles, you know, they're really dependent upon 00:47:44.000 --> 00:47:49.000 Like a Campbell's soup. There are so many casseroles that have like the cream of mushroom or cream of chicken 00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:54.000 as the base. Yeah, so I'm also interested in how like 00:47:54.000 --> 00:47:58.000 the actual physical geography creates 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:01.000 food cultures. 00:48:01.000 --> 00:48:07.000 And I think ASPEC is really, or gelatin jello is representative of that. 00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:18.000 KDI, I also grew up on Vienna Sausages. And so here's the family recipe that I'll put out was my dad would take vienna sausages and put 00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:25.000 I kid you not, horseradish and strawberry jelly. 00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:28.000 You said it was delicious. I would never know. 00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:29.000 Dave, I'm… 00:48:29.000 --> 00:48:37.000 One thing that I think, sorry, I was just going to say like, Katie, your response made me think about the fact that like one thing that I don't really talk about in the report, but some of the 00:48:37.000 --> 00:48:48.000 Some of the essays do is the role of nostalgia in all of this. Sometimes it's important to just preserve things because people care about them personally. And it's a thing from their past and they really, really love it. 00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:54.000 There doesn't necessarily need to be an intellectual interest in a lot of these preservation things. It could just be as simple as, well. 00:48:54.000 --> 00:48:57.000 My grandma used to have this and so it's meaningful to me. 00:48:57.000 --> 00:49:05.000 It's okay, I think, to have those sort of emotional reasons for preserving these things. And kind of to that end, Chris, I wanted to ask you, because I know like 00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:20.000 you as the director of the Internet Archives Library, you're probably very familiar with its collections. I'm wondering if there's any sort of like weird or stranger collections that you wish more people knew about or that more people sort of paid attention to or wrote about. 00:49:20.000 --> 00:49:22.000 Yeah. 00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:27.000 Well, we've mentioned that there's two things, two ways of answering this. There's one 00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:42.000 I have one favorite item and then a favorite collection. And it also came in the chat. So the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which was a project that I was very involved in in its formation and the Internet Archive was an early partner with 00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:46.000 Which was basically the the 00:49:46.000 --> 00:49:56.000 The natural history libraries around the world, like the Smithsonian, the Royal Botanic Gardens Q in London, the Natural History Museum in London, the American Natural Museum and Natural History. 00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:07.000 all got together and realized in the 2010s or 2005, actually, that we were competing for each other for ever limited pools of grant funding to digitize our collections. 00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:16.000 And we actually got that feedback on a grant proposal that was like, why are you competing with each other? Why aren't you collaborating? It's like the light bulb went off. We all said. 00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:25.000 Maybe we could all go together and do a larger project and scan more of our stuff. So that biodiversity heritage Library collection is incredibly important. 00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:38.000 And beautiful. And I want everyone in the world to know that it exists and to go use it. So I'll drop a link to it there. But the single item that I love most at the Internet Archive 00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:51.000 And it's listed on the blog right now. So if you go to blog.archive.org, the second story in there is a staff favorite. And I put this in. 00:50:51.000 --> 00:51:02.000 Sierra Online was a software company in the early 80s, and they created these really amazing immersive games in early visual game development. 00:51:02.000 --> 00:51:07.000 And they did, I think it was 1986 or somewhere in there. 00:51:07.000 --> 00:51:24.000 They did like a video Christmas card that would play on the sales floor of a computer store that had these beautiful backgrounds and really bad 8-bit music. So when I watched, when I look at that. 00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:35.000 I think of the nostalgia of like who I was, like the weird nerdy kid with a computer. I didn't have this software, but I had software like it. 00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:38.000 Every time I look at that, it just takes me 00:51:38.000 --> 00:51:51.000 back to like 1986 or whenever it was the you know the early to mid 80s and what music sounded like, what computing music sounded like, what technology was like. And it's just like it's a 00:51:51.000 --> 00:52:10.000 a time machine, you know, like you can just not only like the way back machine is the time machine for the web. I think the Internet Archive as a whole is a time machine for our memory and for nostalgia. I can just get lost for hours, you know, trolling through memories and content online. 00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:11.000 Dave, I know we're… 00:52:11.000 --> 00:52:19.000 Love it. I wanted to interject, Chris, because we have a few questions that have come in in the chat. You got to one of them about biodiversity. 00:52:19.000 --> 00:52:24.000 Heritage Library. One of them that actually I was wondering about and someone else chatted me about it was um 00:52:24.000 --> 00:52:32.000 In the report, there's this really interesting observation about the shift of publishers from 00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:39.000 being publishers to being data brokers, basically. I think there's a line in there about 00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:47.000 the datafication of cultural consumption and talking specifically about the tv 00:52:47.000 --> 00:52:58.000 industry. And so Luke, I guess this is for you. Could you talk a little bit more about like how that happened and what the world really is, that market is that we're living in right now? 00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:06.000 Yeah, gladly. So in the report, what I do is I link that specifically to the technology of the book and changes in the way in which people distributed media. 00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:12.000 So in the past, right, in the 20th century and before, what would happen is a publisher would get a book 00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:16.000 They would print a bunch of copies of it. And depending on the technology that they use, they would print either 00:53:16.000 --> 00:53:20.000 thousands of copies or hundreds of copies, depending on the print run. 00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:33.000 And then it would be out there after that. People could buy them. People could lend them to their friends. That all became codified in law over the 20th century. And Dave could speak a lot better about the actual laws in particular, which enabled that to happen. 00:53:33.000 --> 00:53:40.000 But there was an ability for people to just have things and to sort of share them with each other. 00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:44.000 And then in particular, over the course of really, I think the last 20 years. 00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:49.000 licensing and streaming became a thing which prevented the ability for people to own 00:53:49.000 --> 00:53:59.000 And therefore to share it. And so subsequently publishers who understandably are interested in profits, I don't blame them, that's their job. Their job is to make money. 00:53:59.000 --> 00:54:03.000 they are incentivized to not give 00:54:03.000 --> 00:54:09.000 like to not do these sort of physical copies or to not give permanent access 00:54:09.000 --> 00:54:17.000 to things like videos or to music and to just really limit the amount of accessibility that people could have on these things. So that way people have to continue subscribing 00:54:17.000 --> 00:54:28.000 They have to continue to pay licensing fees to access things. And in the time where there was like sort of physical objects, there was a kind of balance. I describe it as a balance in cultural posterity. 00:54:28.000 --> 00:54:31.000 Where I talk about the fact that publishers could 00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:44.000 publish these things. They put them out there, and then they could decide to just kind of stop publishing them. And that was fine because there were these things called libraries which were able to collect things and they could lend them out. And then that was all good. 00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:48.000 But with licensing and streaming, it really places the 00:54:48.000 --> 00:55:02.000 the balance of cultural posterity in the hands of the publishers who can decide, well, we're not going to make this license available anymore. And we're just going to pull this content off, which happens every single month when things like Netflix and Disney+. 00:55:02.000 --> 00:55:07.000 They're always every month, these like long lists. This is what's leaving Netflix this year. 00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:17.000 And there's nothing you can do if you care about the content. If it's not available in a physical distribution and it's not available on a streaming site, it's gone. 00:55:17.000 --> 00:55:23.000 And that's the case with stuff like the Colbert Report or Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. 00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:27.000 There's only a couple seasons that are available online to view right now. 00:55:27.000 --> 00:55:38.000 And that's it. And especially if you're like an intellectual historian, you probably care a lot about the material that they were covering, but even just the nostalgia part, those are entertaining and fun things to watch. 00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:45.000 And people can't watch them because they're not available for ownership. 00:55:45.000 --> 00:55:57.000 Thanks. I guess I'll take that opportunity to address there was a question in the chat about copyright and this conflict or potential conflict between copyright and archiving efforts. 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:08.000 And the example that was given was about decompiling old video games. And I actually thought that was an interesting example because it highlights that 00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:18.000 what popular understanding is of what copyright law restricts and what it actually restricts are not always the same thing. I actually view that as 00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:25.000 not a particularly severe conflict between archiving efforts and the law. I think that for 00:56:25.000 --> 00:56:33.000 decompiling software games and finding ways of preserving the content so that people can gain access 00:56:33.000 --> 00:56:38.000 is actually, as far as copyright law. 00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:44.000 For nonprofit libraries and archives like Internet Archive to be relatively safe. I think some of the bigger challenges 00:56:44.000 --> 00:56:52.000 actually come not from copyright law itself, but from licensing practices and contracts. And the report gets into this is like how 00:56:52.000 --> 00:56:59.000 licensing culture and contracts can actually override the rights that libraries and archives have. 00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:05.000 So fair use is really powerful. I mean, there are certain limitations to it. 00:57:05.000 --> 00:57:14.000 But it doesn't mean much at all when you can just write a contract that says you don't get to use your fair use rights. And I think that that's one of the 00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:20.000 most difficult conflicts right now for libraries and archives to manage 00:57:20.000 --> 00:57:32.000 And it's also something that doesn't have to be that way. I mean, if we look around the world and see what's happening, for instance, in the EU or in Singapore or a number of other jurisdictions. 00:57:32.000 --> 00:57:39.000 They have parts of their law that say you can't just contract around the rights that are given 00:57:39.000 --> 00:57:44.000 to libraries and archives and other nonprofit organizations to preserve culture. 00:57:44.000 --> 00:57:54.000 So of course, copyright does have some challenges, and I think we all know that, but I think that that licensing issue is one of the most challenging. 00:57:54.000 --> 00:58:05.000 Dave, I'm looking at the time and we're about out of it, but I would love to give Luca the last word here on our conversation. And so, Luca, you've been steeped 00:58:05.000 --> 00:58:15.000 in these issues now for months. And I'm curious, where are you going with this research and with this line of thinking? What's next? 00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:20.000 Yeah, so I am writing my dissertation right now. So I'm busy with that. 00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:33.000 But I'm also at work with some members of the Stanford Literary Lab right now. We are working on a tentatively titled The Streaming Availability Study. And it's very much inspired by 00:58:33.000 --> 00:58:39.000 El Salvador's video game availability study, where Phil does this wonderful job looking at the commercial availability 00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:50.000 of historical video games. And he discovers really tragically that something like only 10% of the historical video game market is available to purchase right now. And so what we're doing is we're looking at 00:58:50.000 --> 00:59:11.000 the entire run of streaming originals since they first started with House of Cards. And we're examining exactly how many of them are actually still available to stream and to view and specifically also how many of them are available to buy on DVD or Blu-ray because they still do make DVDs in Blu-ray and libraries do still buy them. 00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:15.000 So busy with that and then 00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:18.000 Yeah, Chris, is there other stuff that we want to mention? 00:59:18.000 --> 00:59:20.000 I, yeah. 00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:31.000 So that work sounds really interesting. Something that has come in from people as they've been reading the report is, well, I want the book. Where can I get this bound? And so the 00:59:31.000 --> 00:59:44.000 What we can announce here is that we're working on that. We are going to put together a bound version of the Vanishing Culture Report. It will stay online in the PDF form 00:59:44.000 --> 00:59:54.000 But we're going to take what we have now and bind it and make it available. And then Luca, I hope that you're… 00:59:54.000 --> 00:59:59.000 Please, good luck with the dissertation. And as that works through the system. 00:59:59.000 --> 01:00:08.000 we want you back. We want to keep working on this. I mean, I think that this story never goes old. This preservation story is one that we need to continue to tell 01:00:08.000 --> 01:00:21.000 year after year, moment after moment. And I want to keep putting out more scholarship here and more essays like the excellent one that Katie included in our work. 01:00:21.000 --> 01:00:22.000 Here. 01:00:22.000 --> 01:00:28.000 And I want to be back and I want to keep doing this. This is a concern that's at the heart of what I do. 01:00:28.000 --> 01:00:35.000 And every day I talk to people and they're like, oh, I have this story of vanishing culture. I have this story of vanishing culture. So I think that there's a 01:00:35.000 --> 01:00:39.000 There's a big public interest in this right now, and it's very timely and important. 01:00:39.000 --> 01:00:53.000 Well, let's catch it. And Katie, we'd love to have another essay from you if you'd be interested. Why is it important to preserve ASPEC? I mean, there's there's a lot more that we could explore also with your own research. 01:00:53.000 --> 01:01:02.000 Yeah, just keep me on the line. I mean, I had so much fun writing this. It was great to do something public facing. Luca knows I was gushing the whole time. I was like. 01:01:02.000 --> 01:01:06.000 This is what I'm missing in my life, just writing something that I know that 01:01:06.000 --> 01:01:11.000 you know, it is going to be like immediately accessible to people and um 01:01:11.000 --> 01:01:15.000 Yeah, the cookbook piece i think did just that. So thank you for the opportunity 01:01:15.000 --> 01:01:27.000 Yeah, thank you for doing that. And I also, as we wind down here, I want to acknowledge that we have other authors, essay authors in our virtual crowd here. So we have Jeff Uboys. 01:01:27.000 --> 01:01:43.000 We have Maria Bastillos and Lori Gibbs, all who contributed additional essays into the Vanishing Culture Report. So thank you both, Katie and Luca, for this conversation today. And thank you to the authors who were in the chat. 01:01:43.000 --> 01:01:50.000 From here, we've gone on a little past the top of the hour. So thank you all in the audience for 01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:57.000 For hanging with us. But I would like to wind this down, unfortunately. We have to do that. 01:01:57.000 --> 01:02:17.000 I do hope that everyone can grab a copy of The Vanishing Culture Report. I hope we've whet your appetite and you can't wait to dive in. The essays are really great ways in for sort of personal stories and then the work that Luca did in putting together that part one is really just fantastic. 01:02:17.000 --> 01:02:31.000 We've got the links shared out in the chat. And so please download and read that today. So as we wind down here, I do want to let you know about some more events that are happening in and around the Internet Archive. And so tomorrow. 01:02:31.000 --> 01:02:54.000 our partners at Library Futures are hosting a book talk on the book Meet Me at the Library, which dives into the really interesting, we've mentioned this actually a little bit, the role that libraries play in society, especially right now around helping people with isolation and access to information, the historical role, but that isolation issue 01:02:54.000 --> 01:03:03.000 is really a big one. And so that's going to be a really interesting book talk tomorrow. So I'm joining in because I haven't read the book yet. So I can't wait to hear about it. 01:03:03.000 --> 01:03:25.000 And then at the stroke of midnight this coming January 1st, Creative Works from 1929 and Sound Recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the United States. And on January 22nd, we're going to celebrate those works in a virtual gathering co-hosted by Library Futures and the Internet Archive and with a whole bunch of other friends and academics. 01:03:25.000 --> 01:03:33.000 This year's list of things that are moving into the works that are moving into the public domain include classics like the character Popeye. 01:03:33.000 --> 01:03:43.000 Olive oil was already in the public domain, but Popeye shows up in a cell that was published in 1929. So the character Popeye will move into the public domain. 01:03:43.000 --> 01:03:48.000 books like A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury, the first Marx Brothers film called The Coconuts. 01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:55.000 Those are all moving into the public domain. And then music compositions, not recordings, but the compositions of Bolero. 01:03:55.000 --> 01:04:09.000 putting on the ritz and singing in the rain are all moving into the public domain. That's why we have singing in the public domain as our event theme and title. And what you're seeing here is work from Freya Morgan, who is an artist and illustrator who works with us 01:04:09.000 --> 01:04:15.000 And we've dubbed the dancer in the center the Lockette. 01:04:15.000 --> 01:04:29.000 a way of representing like open access materials in the public domain. So we're going to work the lockette into a whole bunch of different things, especially into the feature for public domain day this year. Again, January 22nd. 01:04:29.000 --> 01:04:47.000 So to close down here, I'd like to wrap as we always do with the commitments and thank you. So today's session, as we said, is being recorded. The links will be shared and put on archive.org tonight. And you will all receive, everyone who's registered will receive an email with the recording link and with those resources. 01:04:47.000 --> 01:05:00.000 For thank yous. Big thank you to Luca and Katie for sharing your information, your passions here, and joining me in such a fun conversation today. 01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:05.000 And as always, to Dave Hansen and Authors Alliance for facilitating and for co-hosting 01:05:05.000 --> 01:05:11.000 our session and to you, the audience, because this is our last book talk of the year, I wanted to share some stats. 01:05:11.000 --> 01:05:28.000 This year we hosted 10 book talks. We've got links to those out in the chat. And that brought together more than 1,300, that's 1,300 actual real live people across the top here of these sessions. So a big thank you to all of you who came here today and who have come 01:05:28.000 --> 01:05:36.000 At previous sessions. Thank you for your time and your enthusiasm, not only today, but throughout the year. 01:05:36.000 --> 01:05:51.000 So we've got our final links out in chat and you can use those links to stay up to date on everything that's happening at and around the Internet Archive through our blog and through our events calendar. So to sign off here, we've got a really busy December. 01:05:51.000 --> 01:06:10.000 Looking forward to those materials moving into the public domain on January 1 and then celebrate with us on January 22nd. There's going to be more announcements on our public domain events and festivities and the best way to stay up to date with those is across our social media and with our blog. 01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:18.000 So to sign off here, I hope to see you at one of our upcoming events. Thanks all. This has been a great year of conversations. 01:06:18.000 --> 01:06:25.000 And I just want to thank everyone for their time and hope that you all have a great day and a good holiday season. 01:06:25.000 --> 01:06:30.000 Thanks, everyone.